Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Well here’s a bit of self-aggrandizement, but it’s cool. The front gate of the Indian National Science Academy sports a big fancy poster advertising my talk—in English and Hindi! Professor L. S. Shashidhara from IISER Pune, who sponsored and arranged my whole visit here, took this vanity picture. Not shown are the two pi-puppies who were snuffling around my feet.
The translation is almost line for line, so “Prof. Jerry Coyne” is the ninth line down on the left side. Now I know what my name looks like in Hindi!
I’m told that many of the attendees will be science teachers and students, with the teachers wanting to learn how to teach evolution. Though I’m no expert in pedagogy, I’ve tweaked the talk to make it more of a “critical thinking” exercise and have cut out some of the religion-dissing.
I’m writing this 1.5 hours before the talk starts, and will briefly report how it went when it’s done, which will be in the middle of the night U.S. time.
INTERRUPTION FOR TALK AND LUNCH
. . . My job here is done; I had a 10-minute introduction (always embarassingly laudatory in India), a one-hour talk, and 45 minutes of very good questions. My cold has abated and so I thought it went well (it’ll be videotaped, but there’s not much you folks haven’t seen before). Many of the attendees were local students, and I was heartened, as I have been this whole trip, by the high proportion of women among them, and by the fact that the women students were forthright and not afraid to argue with me. I hope India makes use of this pool of talent, as women tell me they still face bars to professional advancement at the post-Ph.D. level.
Even though religion was a very small part of the talk, at least half of the questions were about it, including from a Buddhist who told me that Buddhist scriptures were not only 100% consonant with science, but in fact anticipated all modern scientific advances. We hear this from Islam, too, with some scholars, as I show in Faith versus Fact, maintaining that the Qur’an already contains all modern scientific knowledge. That’s when “properly interpreted”, of course! I also mentioned that reincarnation and karma were faith-based concepts with no evidence from science.
Afterwards, some of the Institute dignitaries had lunch with me, which was fun, and besides sabzi, paneer curry, yogurt, rice and chappatis, there was vanilla ice cream and warm gulab jamun—a great combination.
I leave the guest house at 10 p.m. for the one-hour drive to the airport, and then three hours till my 2 pm flight. Wish me luck!
Good morning! Jerry here, with a few words before I turn this over to Grania. As I write this it’s 8:15 a.m. in Delhi, on January 4, though nearly 9 p.m. in Chicago on January 3. I leave tonight from Delhi at 2 a.m.—assuming the smog doesn’t delay my flight. I see out the window that the air is again semi-solid.
I had a great trip and have many more pictures to post, but will do so after I return. Now we return to our regularly scheduled writer. . . .
Good morning, Grania here. I don’t think what I do with the Hili Dialogue can be called “writing”, more like copy-pasta. However, here we go again.
Some short videos showcasing the dignity and majesty of animals:
⠀ The reaction of the other penguins is hilarious ,they're acting like people who see someone acting crazy on the street 😂🐧 ⠀ pic.twitter.com/TNEXafO5xI
The first guess from one of my 1st graders was “death” and such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didn’t want to tell them that actually the answer is the letter e, which just seemed so banal in the moment pic.twitter.com/7sYFxHNcZk
Giving squid a little tap to help them come back after anesthesia never gets old to me. I love watching them spring back to life ☺️🦑 pic.twitter.com/QigzZgnrWs
Finally, we have but a single reader’s wildlife photo today, but it’s a lovely one. It comes from reader Don Bredes, and here are his notes on a photo called “Doe at dawn”:
Just after 7 am at 5 degrees F [JAC: that’s -15°C]. We have about 14 inches of light snow on the ground here in the hills of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, as you may judge by the doe’s legs. She’s a pretty big deer. She tolerated my presence for about 15 seconds, then bounded off, with a companion, down the hill. Those are the White Mountains on the horizon. Damn cold on Mt. Washington, you can be sure.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Hili dialogue came with an explanatory note from Malgorzata: “It’s not clearly visible on the picture but Hili is lying on Andrzej who is reading a book.”
Hili: What cats do when they live with humans who do not read books?
A: They get bored.
In Polish:
Hili: Co robią koty u ludzi, którzy nie czytają książek?
Ja: Nudzą się.
Here’s my answer: a worker honeybee was visiting a white flower to get nectar. She was attacked by a white crab spider who was remarkably camouflaged (probably chemically, as well as visually). The crab spider had another, brown, crab spider sitting on it.
Now for the bit you may have missed – no sooner had the deed been done than a kleptoparasitic fly turned up and landed on the poor bee’s abdomen (you can just make out its red eyes), hoping to slurp up some juices from the corpse. So we have two kingdoms (plants, animals), two classes in the arthropod phylum (chelicerates and insects), two orders of insect (Hymenoptera and Diptera) and two members of the chelicerate family Thomisidae (probably both in the same genus, Thomisus). If you want to know more about crab spiders, I highly recommend Douglass H. Morse’s 2007 book “Predator Upon A Flower”.
At least 21 people have been killed in the protest by Iran’s citizens—mostly working-class people—against the government’s corruption and inequalities of wealth and treatment. As the New York Times reports, the protests were sparked largely by economic issues but seem to have metastasized into a larger discontent about freedom and equality in general:
Antigovernment protests roiled Iran on Tuesday, as the death toll rose to 21 and the nation’s supreme leader blamed foreign enemies for the unrest. But the protests that have spread to dozens of Iranian cities in the past six days were set off by miscalculations in a long-simmering power struggle between hard-liners and reformers.
By Tuesday, Iran’s leaders could no longer ignore the demonstrations and felt compelled to respond publicly. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, blamed outside “enemies” but did not specify who. President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate, appealed for calm while saying the protesters had a right to be heard.
But the anger behind the protests was directed against the entire political establishment.
While the protests that swept Iran in 2009 were led by the urban middle class, these protests have been largely driven by disaffected young people in rural areas, towns and small cities who have seized an opening to vent their frustrations with a political elite they say has hijacked the economy to serve its own interests.
Unemployment for young people — half the population — runs at 40 percent, analysts believe. Meanwhile, Iran has spent billions of dollars abroad in recent years to extend its influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
The initial catalyst for the anger appears to have been the leak by President Rouhani last month of a proposed government budget. For the first time, secret parts of the budget, including details of the country’s religious institutes, were exposed.
The government has shut down most social media (another sign of lack of freedom), and women have added their voices to the protest, doffing their headscarves and flaunting their opposition to veiling, as in this young woman who, having removed her compulsory hijab, is also waving her white shawl about (“White Wednesdays” are one way Iranian women expressing their opposition to veiling: they wear white on that one day of the week):
ويديوي جديد دختري كه شال سفيدش را به چوب بسته و در هوا مي چرخاند #چهارشنبه_های_سفید This woman standing in a busy street without her headscarf and waving a white shawl has become the latest symbol of Iranian women’s struggle against compulsory hijab#whitewednesdayspic.twitter.com/OGz2LHSYj2
The woman above is now reported to have been arrested. Quelle suprise!
The tweet below is courtesy of Heather Hastie; it’s reminiscent of women’s mass opposition to veiling in 1979 when the theocracy began in Iran and veiling became compulsory (see my posts here and here).
Today, I have been protesting here at the University of Tehran without wearing the compulsory veil. Amongst the protesting men and women. Although I was attacked by tear gas, I am still proud of having participated in this protest. #IranProtests#تظاهرات_سراسرىpic.twitter.com/eI9venKYJS
As I noted before, feminist organizations like NOW or The Women’s March have pretty much stayed away from even mentioning the Iran protests, much less the involvement of women who continue to decry their second-class status. One prominent hijabi has said nothing about it except to criticize Trump for his immigration ban. That has created what has been described as “the troll of the year”, below:
That’s hilarious, but of course Sarsour will never put herself on the line by decrying the oppression of women in Muslim countries.
A general summary of the silence from women on the Left is at (sorry) Fox News. Yes, it’s partly an excuse to bash the Left and perhaps feminists, but so what? The facts seem sound, and we simply cannot count on the Left and its media in general to support women’s rights in Muslim countries. What a pity that I have to cite right-wing sources to show what’s happening. An excerpt:
What’s empowering about the hijab is the choice to don one. Muslim women in the United States have that choice. Women in Iran do not. If these pro-women groups are all about choice for deprived women around the globe, now would be a good time to speak up on behalf of them.
Women in Iran are standing in defiance of the regime’s financial support of Hezbollah and Hamas rather than fair wages and human rights. But for progressive women’s groups to oppose Hamas in the face of these protests, it would mean abandoning months of pro-Palestinian support, capped off last week when pop singer Lorde cancelled her Tel Aviv show.
Sarsour, as a self-professed leading advocate for Muslim women in the United States and around the world, should be asked to clarify her position by journalists who are all too eager to present her with awards and speaking gigs: Does she support the women of Iran or the hardline theocracy that is currently brutalizing them?
What’s disgusting about all this are some Left-wing commenters who tell us that we have to stay out of this fracas, even verbally. While I agree that this is the Iranian people’s protest, and that the U.S. has no call to intervene, that doesn’t mean we can’t criticize the oppressive government or can’t stand on the side of those who want freedom. If America is supposed to stand for anything, it’s supposed to stand for supporting freedom, democracy, and equal rights for all citizens.
Yes, of course we sometimes fail at that ourselves, and yes, we’ve made unwarranted incursions into the Middle East, including Iran. But that doesn’t mean that all of us lack the moral authority to criticize those countries!
What’s angered many Leftists are a pair of tweets, one from Donald Trump. If this tweet came from, say, Hillary Clinton, people would applaud it, as its sentiments are sound. But because it came from Trump, a man who included Iran on the “restricted immigration” list, and who of course can say nothing that any Leftist would ever praise, it’s been vilified. (Whether it’s hypocritical to restrict immigration from a country and yet support the people’s right to self-determination is something I’ll leave to the readers.)
Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with regime’s corruption & its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad. Iranian govt should respect their people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching! #IranProtests
More distressing to me is this noncomittal, almost smarmy, tweet from former Secretary of State John Kerry, which more or less says, “Shut up about Iran. It’s not our business”:
With humility about how little we know about what's happening inside Iran, this much is clear: it's an Iranian moment and not anyone else's. But the rights of people to protest peacefully and voice their aspirations are universal and governments everywhere should respect that.
Israel’s hard-right government praised the protesters, and so has the American right. In some cases, they’ve pivoted to feminist sentiment. “The most striking images coming out of the Iran human rights protests are not of men—they are of women,” Fox News columnist Stephen Miller asserted. “So the question must be asked: Where are the women’s movement supporters in the United States and Europe, which gathered en masse to protest a newly inaugurated American president last year?”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration used the protests to threaten further sanctions on Iran—which would come at the expense of the same protesters it ostensibly supports. The president himself has repeatedly tweeted his support for the protesters, but there is widespread suspicion of Trump in Iran due to his attempt to ban Iranians from entering the United States. Lindsey Graham, one of the GOP’s hawks in the Senate, said on Sunday that the protests were evidence that the Iranian nuclear deal, which promised sanctions relief, had failed.
Many argue that such vocal support is counter-productive, since the regime can use it as evidence that the protests are indeed fomented by outsiders. “I, too, want to see the government in Tehran weakened, moderated or even removed,” Philip Gordon wrote in The New York Times. “So let me offer Mr. Trump some unsolicited advice: Keep quiet and do nothing.” Protesters themselves haven’t requested these public statements, which is in keeping with trends in public opinion; a 2016 survey by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies found that most Iranians considered the U.S. to be “actively obstructive” in Iranian affairs.
Frankly, I don’t care whether the protestors requested statements from Americans. Trump, of course, is a special case, as his words carry more weight, but still I find nothing objectionable per se in his tweet above. But I feel no onus myself to shut up about Iran. The regime is theocratic, oppressive, misogynistic, and dangerous. (I’m starting to worry that our nuclear deal with the country might turn out to be a bad business.) I stand with the protestors, women and men alike.
Here’s Gordon’s piece mentioned above:
Well, at least the Times published a counter-piece, and I’ve put an excerpt below:
When you read comments about Iran it’s helpful to mentally substitute the names of other disreputable regimes. On Sunday, for example, former Secretary of State John Kerry tweeted the following about the Iranians who have taken to the streets to protest their theocracy: “With humility about how little we know about what’s happening inside Iran, this much is clear: it’s an Iranian moment and not anyone else’s.”
Would Mr. Kerry have said the same about Poland under Communism or black South Africans under apartheid? Would anyone in good conscience or with any strategic insight have recommended that the correct approach for Washington toward Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski or Prime Minister P.W. Botha was to remain quiet and do nothing?
Indeed! Once again we see the soft bigotry of low expectations. With such a lack of leadership, it’s no wonder the Democrats are so weak and divided.
So Trump — even if he understands little or nothing of Iran, even if his talk of Iranian “human rights” sounds hollow from a sometime advocate of torture, even if his support of the Iranian people today is grotesque from the man who has wrongheadedly barred most Iranians from entering the United States — is right to speak up in solidarity and tweet that the “wealth of Iran is being looted” by a “brutal and corrupt Iranian regime.” It is. Given where American-Iranian relations stand, there is not much downside to this bluntness.
. . . What has not changed since 2009 is the bravery of Iranians. I watched in awe as women stood their ground and faced down baton-wielding police officers. Today, protesters are chanting that Khamenei should go. They are chanting death to the Revolutionary Guards. They are chanting, “Independence, freedom, Iranian republic.”
If the Right stands with the protestors, even if their reasons are different from ours, that’s no reason for us to remain silent. We can’t shut up just because we hate the Right so much that we cannot align with anything they say. If this country is not to be sundered completely, we must find some common ground with our opponents. Supporting the protests in Iran is one way to do that.
